Death, Dying and Grief - Every Moment is a Death with Sam Lee Zemke

In this compelling episode, we speak with Sam Lee Zemke. Sam is part of our podcast family and does terrific work as our editor. He is a jack of many trades and interests: radical anthropologist, neo-mythologist, cooperative living counselor, mediator, artist, musician, improviser, ancestral advocate, part-time house spirit, and service magician. He is my friend on the Sufi path, and I’ve known him since he was a little rascal! Sam has been walking a lifelong journey with the trickster and has an excellent affinity for the liminal parts of life. Transformation and boundary tending have revealed themselves to be key facets of the work Sam has been called to do, and they endeavor to honor that call to the best of their ability. 

In our conversation, Sam shares his unique perspectives on death, transformation, and community living. He reflects on his early experiences with and the importance of rituals in processing loss, as well as the interconnectedness of all beings. We emphasize the significance of community and relationships in navigating life's transitions. Ultimately, our conversation underscores the importance of acknowledging and valuing the unique contributions each person brings to the collective experience of healing and support. We explore themes of transformation, community learning, and the importance of reclaiming indigenous wisdom in the face of societal collapse. 

LINKS:

His Podcast - A House of Hungry Ghosts

Sam's Instagram

Hospicing Modernity book

Robin Wall Kimmerer's 'The Serviceberry'

Transcript

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Wakil David Matthews (00:04.086)
Welcome everyone. Today we are delighted to speak with Sam Zemke. Sam's a part of our podcast family. He does terrific work as our editor. So glad to be able to talk to him today. He's a jack of many trades and interests. He's a radical anthropologist, a neo-mythologist, a cooperative living counselor, a mediator, artist, musician, improviser, ancestral advocate, part-time house spirit and service magician.

I want to hear more about those. He's also he's also a dear friend of mine on the Sufi path, who I've known since he was a little rascal running around Sufi camp.

Annalouiza (00:34.337)
Hahaha

Annalouiza (00:43.891)
So sweet. Sam has been walking a lifelong journey with a trickster and has a great affinity for the liminal parts of life. Transformation and boundary tending have revealed themselves to be the key facets of the work Sam has been called to do. And they endeavor to honor that call to the best of their ability. Wow. I'm so excited to get to know you, Sam.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:08.331)
Oh thank you! I'm so excited to be here! Yay!

Annalouiza (01:12.006)
Yay!

Wakil David Matthews (01:12.438)
Great. We're so glad you could do this with us. Well, we always start, you know, very well because you're our editor. 

Sam Lee Zemke (01:15.667)
Mm-hmm. I do know

Wakil David Matthews (01:16.8)
We like to, it kind of helps us get to know folks. It's like, tell us more about when you first were aware of death in your life.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:29.898)
Yeah, there's two that I've been thinking of preparing for interview today. First, think most of my work with death has been less literal and more symbolic. Energetic death, death of time periods in people's lives, things like that. So the first awareness was when I was three or four years old, I had a favorite pair of shoes. They were slip-on shoes with radical iguanas on them. It was the 90s. 


Wakil David Matthews (02:19.82)
Hmm.
Ha ha.

Sam Lee Zemke (02:38.158)
And I could not let them go. I wore them until they were absolutely falling apart. And my mom said, you can't wear them anymore. They're done. And so we created a ritual and built a ceremonial fire and put the shoes in the fire and burned them up. And so that's my very first memory of something that I loved and was struggling to let go of, dying. 

Wakil David Matthews (02:50.698)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (03:06.35)
The second was when I was maybe eight or nine. We had a great friend of ours, Sufi friend who had cancer and either had decided or had been determined that it was like pretty terminal and so he wasn't going through the chemo stuff like that so it was was end of life stuff and he came to live with us and so he was in our house for the last maybe three or four months of his life. 

Wakil David Matthews (03:34.668)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (03:35.596)
So I watched that process and I think my parents tried to him on the day that he passed, but it didn't work. Because I have a pretty clear memory of walking in the room to say good morning and everybody was gathered and he was no longer in his body.

Wakil David Matthews (03:48.65)
Hahaha.

Annalouiza (03:49.202)
Ha ha ha.

Wakil David Matthews (03:58.7)
That's fascinating. I mean, your mom and I are very dear friends and I can really imagine her being kind of person to create ritual and to take care of somebody like that. yeah, that's wow. What an incredible, I'd like to, if I can just ask more about how that felt to you as a child as you walked in and what was your reaction to that?

Sam Lee Zemke (04:23.052)
Yeah, of course. It's hard to access where I was as a child. I'm here now. And so most of it is retrospect. But I don't remember great distress, strange, odd.

Wakil David Matthews (04:31.542)
Sure. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (04:49.934)
And looking back, think the, certainly the, the wan-ness, the, the sort of emaciation was visually striking, but that had been such a long process of wasting that, that it was just sort of the punctuation moment on that.

Wakil David Matthews (05:25.996)
Makes sense, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (05:27.416)
But growing up in rural Montana and, you know, hunting and fishing and, you know, being part of like outdoor programs and learning to like butcher and process our own food, the process of life and death, I don't think even then was super far away.

Wakil David Matthews (05:55.318)
Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, part of life. Yeah, much.

Annalouiza (05:58.801)
Yeah, and I was going to say, so there's that whole process, the cycle of life that you had with your animal husbandry, right? 

Sam Lee Zemke (06:23.138)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (06:26.051)
But what I want to go back to, because I have lived with the exact same kind of kiddo, I think my daughter and you have a similar attachment to your favorite XYZ. She literally has had shoes that her toes were sticking out and she refused. She flat out refused to let them go. We still have a few blouses that she wore day in day out for a couple of years. And it's just like the, it's like a stained glass at this point, cause it's so, it's so, you know, see through, but she still has them because she, and the only reason she has had to stop wearing them is because they're literally a tatters. 

And you know what I appreciate about that. And when you said that you've witnessed like the, the death of time, I think that is a really interesting component because you as a child have watched the life and the demise of your favorite loved clothing, the rise and demise of your friend living in your home. You watch not just like the abrupt cycle of life. Here's our food and here's the, you know, a death, but you've watched the flow of that end, which I think is really different because I think people can get that moment of punctuation of this is death, but you actually were in the Tao with a death, right? just like rolling through the ending. And I, I've never thought about that. And I think that is an incredibly astute way of, almost slows time down.

Sam Lee Zemke (07:28.696)
Mm-hmm.
Right.

Annalouiza (07:44.819)
Because people are like, he was suddenly gone, right? And for you, it's like, I watched the emaciation process. I watched my shoe, 

Wakil David Matthews (07:51.18)
Dissolve.

Sam Lee Zemke (08:04.854)
Absolutely. Yeah. thank you.

Wakil David Matthews (08:11.424)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (08:14.993)
… and yeah, it dissolved. And I think that is, it feels like such a beautiful and connective, it's almost like a connective tissue for life, to be able to be aware of that. So wow, that is really cool. You're the first one who's ever said this. you've just opened up a portal into my death.
world.

Sam Lee Zemke (08:15.638)
I love that.

Wakil David Matthews (08:15.818)
Yeah, yeah, that's so good. And it's so important to realize that there's so many little deaths. In fact, the poem we're going to later is, or that we'll read anyway, speaks to that. So I really think that's an important part of our learning here and speaking about end of life, is that ends of life happen in so many ways. Yeah, thank you for that.

Sam Lee Zemke (08:36.832)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean every every moment is is a death each moment dies and it and each breath and You know who I was when I woke up this morning is not who I am right now that in some ways that person is dead And I and I think on the other side of that what has lasted from those shoes is…

Wakil David Matthews (08:43.03)
There you go. Each breath, yeah.

Annalouiza (08:43.762)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (09:06.958)
… the deep sense of animacy of life. You know, I remember in college learning about animistic spiritual forms, they talked about the difference between animism, which is the belief that everything has a spirit, and animacy, which is the inherent life of the thing independent of our belief.

Wakil David Matthews (09:16.637)
Mmm, mmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (09:36.298)
And so each pair of shoes, because it goes on a journey, any differentiated piece is alive, has a spirit to it. 

Annalouiza (09:40.945)
Yes! Yes! Yes!

Wakil David Matthews (09:46.09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (10:06.92)
You know, the cardboard box that the shoes come in does. And once, and it's an item and it comes to you as, as this being, and then the shoes become a life and then the, you know, the box becomes life and it goes on its own journey. You know, the chicken bone, the chicken is a chicken. And then as you piece it all apart, it becomes different things going on different journeys. And as you create things and put things together in like a sculpture or an art project, all of those disparate pieces come together to form a new life and that goes on its own journey until it breaks apart.

Wakil David Matthews (10:11.307)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (10:22.203)
A new live form. Sam, I am so delighted by you. just I'm like, I want to just I want to Wakil to tuck you in his pocket and bring you along so we could spend long hours just like sharing because I really like you're you're like my kin. I could totally sense this two things. So I had to like this is another thing too. 

Wakil David Matthews (10:23.542)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (10:46.519)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (10:50.579)
But when I sometimes I I talk to my truck and I literally like her name is Athena, but I when I'm thinking about her and you know, she's had some car issues this last year and you know, we've been taking care of her little problems, but I think about like the, the, the oil that came up that is in her. I think about the, all the metal and how it was made. And I, and I sit there and I'm driving and I'm like talking to her, all the parts of her and, being like, babe, like, you know, I need you to like, tell me what's going on so that I can help you. 

Sam Lee Zemke (11:08.672)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (11:14.774)
Hahaha.

Annalouiza (11:20.295)
So I have this, I have this relationship with my, my things, which I don't like that word but things and tell them like, I remember when you were just a tree or I remember when you were cotton in the fields, which leads me to, I started writing this story like two months ago that I'm still poking away. And it's about the bleeding of a tree that gives out latex in order to become a bed. And the bed has sentience. So stay tuned.

Wakil David Matthews (11:21.451)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:36.654)
Mm-hmm. it remembers being a part of that tree on some level. Yeah, yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (11:38.058)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (11:45.339)
Yes, it remembers the thermal airs and the heat when it's sitting in this warehouse. What am I doing? What? But yeah, I've been working on this story. But I really appreciate that. And it reminds me back to this whole concept of recognizing that deaths are every moment, every day. The you who woke up this morning is no longer the you who's sitting with us, right?

Wakil David Matthews (11:45.504)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (11:57.142)
Hmm

Annalouiza (12:14.003)
And I wonder if that sensation is really important for more and more people to understand so that the whole concept of this end of life is not so different from the end of this morning and the end of breakfast and the end of my nails. Right. Like it's all really interconnected. So yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (12:25.548)
All right.

Sam Lee Zemke (12:29.981)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (12:32.266)
Yeah, so much. I really appreciate that too. Yeah. If we recognize that everything's vibrating, you know, that gives that, yeah, I was just reading something the other day that there's no, there's nothing that isn't filled with these live cells or these bits of stardust, you know, that have created what we all live around. So yeah, there's living and dying in every moment. Yeah. Thank you, Sam. Go ahead.

Sam Lee Zemke (12:55.67)
Yeah. Yeah, the, I wanted to add to that too, that the difference in affinity, right? Because just because every moment is a death doesn't mean that some moments don't matter more to us because we spend time with them. I think the, you know,

Wakil David Matthews (13:23.616)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (13:25.454)
you know the death of your breakfast in the morning as it goes into your belly you haven't spent that long with that breakfast and if it's a really good breakfast you might mourn the end of that breakfast but you know

Annalouiza (13:34.215)
Right, right, right. Or breakfast with friends who have a different kind of feeling, right?

Wakil David Matthews (13:41.046)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (13:41.934)
Right? And we appreciate that in a different way. But like the death of a relationship that you've spent a long time with hurts in a different way because you've woven so many more threads between you and that other person or you in that moment or those shoes that you love that you have to throw into the fire. They've been with you on so many walks, on so many journeys together.

Wakil David Matthews (13:50.315)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (14:06.545)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Adventures. Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (14:08.182)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (14:09.09)
that it hurts when it goes away and when you don't get to walk with that anymore.

Wakil David Matthews (14:13.728)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (14:15.601)
Right. So let's start again with the shoes though. Can you tell me about the ritual that your mom had you do? like, what did it feel like to you going through that as a kiddo?

Wakil David Matthews (14:28.812)
Yeah, I love that you're doing ritual at that age. That's so good.

Sam Lee Zemke (14:30.624)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mostly remember the fire and the, was a special fire in our little fire pit specifically for that. And we spent the time to sit with the gratitude for what they were and the loss of not having them anymore, not being in that anymore.

But was, you know, that was, that's a pretty foundational, formational memory. And so it's those big hits of like, okay, we're going to sit and we're just going to be present with this and we're going to acknowledge the importance that these, that these hold. And then with the support of the ritual of the ceremony, we're going to let it go and let it move on into memory or into its next phase and let these shoes become what they're, what they're going to do when they're next journey.

Wakil David Matthews (15:09.899)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (15:15.036)
Yeah.
And also offering them back up to mother earth, right? In some form, because essentially there they came from her and now they're returning to her. 

Sam Lee Zemke (15:49.992)
they're returning. We don't have to talk about rubber and the ecological impacts of burning shoes but we don't have to go down that road.

Annalouiza (15:55.036)
I know I did have that thought too…

Wakil David Matthews (15:53.792)
I was going to say that. Yeah. Yeah. My head was going to microplastics. My head was going to microplastics. Yeah.

Annalouiza (16:01.533)
But I was like but it's transmuted. Yes. Of course we both did. But you know what? It's transmuted by our gratitude. We have to metabolize what we know now. But it's still a loss. It's so, yeah. wow. So Sam, how has this death story, this foundational experience impacted the story of your life.

Sam Lee Zemke (16:36.654)
What ways hasn't it impacted my life? 

Wakil David Matthews (16:39.692)
That might be right, yeah.

Annalouiza (16:40.561)
Right. I mean, that's the right answer for sure.

Sam Lee Zemke (17:06.024)
Right like like part of that part of that realization of What my guiding archetype is in certain language around trickster and That liminal place that transformational place seeing the importance in those transformative moments is a through line from start to finish.

Most of my deep intimate partnerships have happened in transitional moments in my life or in theirs. And as I walk more intentionally into that, I find myself showing up in places at turning points. And for better, maybe for better or worse, we don't, don't…

Wakil David Matthews (17:52.3)
Hmm.

Annalouiza (17:58.575)
No judgment, no judgment.

Sam Lee Zemke (18:14.99)
I don't know. don't have the grand, I don't, and I don't have the grand perspective of, you know, determining what's good or bad. Sometimes it's harder than others. But I have worked in one of my great passions is communal living. For 10 years, I was convinced that the only way we were going to be able to like live together and overcome this hyper-individuated world that we have found ourselves in was to all live on communes and live in intentional communities. And I tried to build them, I tried to work with them for a long time. through some large transformations in my life over the last couple of years, I ended up living on a friend of mine, his property out in the Paradise Valley, Montana as his godfather was beginning to decline from Parkinson's and he had been informed that he was going to be inheriting this property. And I was like, great, that's a great opportunity for, you know, if you want to get a bunch of our friends out here to live together. 

Wakil David Matthews (19:38.518)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (19:42.882)
But his Godfather had the same idea, child of the 70s, know, the community boom. And so he gathered all of the material things to do that, but didn't have the social component. And so it was just this accumulation of stuff. And I talked about living there, like living in the Bardo, his, the place between life and death, 

Wakil David Matthews (20:07.34)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (20:11.598)
Because there was all of this this baggage from this guy's life that he didn't have the support to process through. And so I was living there in an RV by myself and doing what I could by myself. But on an energetic level, you know, I'd go up every sunset and sing on top of the hill and sing to the land. And I had to leave because it wasn't ready. It wasn't ready to take the next step. And, but then after I left, my friend was like, okay, I'm talking with my neighbor and a bunch of the broken down machines were going to get those pulled out and a bunch, you know, we're going to have work parties. so it catalyzed motion and, and so, you know, that's that liminal in between one thing and another, where I was able to show up and help it move from this stuck place. 

Wakil David Matthews (21:20.298)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (21:37.87)
And from there, I went to another community that had been a rehab farm for vets. And through COVID, they realized how burnt out they were and they wanted to shift to the healers living there rather than those needing healed living there, but they weren't quite there. 

Wakil David Matthews (22:05.002)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (22:06.183)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (22:06.862)
And they didn't quite have the owners themselves, ownership in a community is its own difficult quality to navigate. But they were still working on their own healing. And so they weren't able to hold the healers because the healers would come and say, okay, but before we start healing people that want to come in, we need to heal what's going on here.

Wakil David Matthews (22:33.385)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (22:34.307)
And so there were lot of hard conversations around that. It's different now, and I don't think that it's attracting the same type of people in their healing journey who are ready to be hosting people to do healing work. 

Wakil David Matthews (23:09.291)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (23:19.544)
And they have taken a step back to be more I'm more in line with where they are too. Because it was really hard. And it sucks if you're like in a certain place in your healing journey and it's hard for you to like look in your shadows because you're so... There's so much, right? Veterans and you know children of abuse and you're, you you've been spending all this time helping other people and accumulating trauma on the land. 

And then people, people are coming in and going, you got to look at your stuff guys. We're going to like, if you want to do it the way that you want to do it, we're all going to go sit in the cave. And they're like, I'll drown. I'll never come out. And that's not fun for anybody because everybody's going kicking and screaming. 

Wakil David Matthews (23:57.162)
Yeah, yeah.
Hahaha.

Annalouiza (24:03.805)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (24:19.182)
And then the last one in this progression because my that experience for me cracked open the conception of community that communities are wherever we are and and I personally don't have to go live with a bunch of strangers and do all of the heavy lifting to build foundational relationships.

Annalouiza (24:44.519)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (24:44.671)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (24:48.984)
Because I grew up in such a beautiful, intimate, close community with the Sufis, and also by nature of my parents, there are communities wherever they've gone. 

Wakil David Matthews (25:00.373)
Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (25:18.318)
And so I spent last summer in Bismarck, North Dakota, helping a dear family friend of my mom's. He was her former husband's best friend, and his wife had died a couple years prior and her stuff was still in the house. Like she'd been writing a book about this very prolific artist and the filing cabinets were still in the living room and her clothes were still in the closet. You know, it's two years him by himself.

Annalouiza (25:47.901)
Hm.

Wakil David Matthews (25:49.622)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (26:15.91)
You know, it was, she was still so present and alive in the house and taking up so much space. so part of what I went to do was help clear out what he was ready to clear out. And so we moved those filing cabinets into their own space in the basement and, you know, reached out to whoever needed to be reached out to to get all of her super fancy clothes off to consignment stores and all of these things, know, moving books and clearing computers and just letting him expand a little and move on and become freer from the very physical cage that her material remains had created in his life.

Annalouiza (26:40.911)
Yeah. so I have a question about that though. So did he, did he reach out to you to ask you if you could come help? You did. Okay. And

Sam Lee Zemke (26:48.494)
Yeah, yeah, was through my mom and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (26:54.321)
The community. Yeah. I think it's interesting that it was like two years and he was still having, you know, struggling to to make that move with her energy. Right. So part of me is like, it's OK to take as long as you need. And then there's a very real aspect that sometimes it it handicaps your life because you're still trying to lift up the the the energy, that spirit of somebody who's, who's gone from the physical realm, right? So I just think it's really interesting. Like it is important work. And I want people listening to this to understand like everything has its own timeline. And sometimes you do need to have help processing and witnessing this shift. It's a big one.

Wakil David Matthews (27:44.288)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm glad. I was just thinking I'm kind of looking at our list here and I'm thinking about how the kind of the the through line, as you said earlier, is this willingness to be there, be present and try to kind of guide or assist anyway, communities, people in this because, you know, the question we usually ask about your role in your work. 

But I think that I can just see that work that you've taken on or that you've become what you've become is this person who's willing to go in and look at, you know, what's real, what's really going on and try to open things up for people, help things, help things process, help things get done. And I appreciate too that they, what you said last about, you know, at some point I don't have to keep doing this for strangers. You know, I have a community already and we do, we do have a community. We all have these communities around us.

Sam Lee Zemke (28:37.93)
Right. Right.

Annalouiza (28:38.066)
Mm.

Wakil David Matthews (28:43.028)
And just being and that kind of sense and that information or that important recognition that we are in community all the time. And that work that you're talking about is always needed. That's that ability to be present and to think about, you know, how can I what can I do today to help the community around me grow, be stronger, be be more connected? So, yeah.

Annalouiza (29:06.727)
Well, and it's like you're offering pastoral care, right? Like, I feel like it really is. Like, I think about it because I'm sensitive to the needs of strangers who are still my kin on a spiritual level. 

Wakil David Matthews (29:10.239)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (29:36.433)
And so, you know, my kids always say, God, mom, everybody always just like comes up to you and tells you all this stuff and you always end up helping people. And, you know, there's like a little bit of, of, of they wanted to shut me down because it's like you spend so much energy with strangers. And on the other hand, it's like I'm sensitive spirit is calling me to like bear witness to everything. And when I can be of support, I can be a support. I can also say no and call somebody else in. But I get the sense that you're also, you know, you. Yes, this is the work, the life work of bearing witness, being sensitive to the needs and saying, hey, I could show up and be of support to you.

Wakil David Matthews (30:02.262)
Yeah. And, and, knowing the boundaries to say, yeah, okay, I'm kind of done now. Yeah.

Annalouiza (30:06.631)
Yeah. That's the kicker.

Sam Lee Zemke (30:06.86)
And that's the kicker. That is the kicker. And my biggest work internally and with myself, and I was just thinking about this the other day as my fiery self came in and was like, I'm out of gas. I'm giving too much. I'm not getting enough back. My gas tank is empty. Get the heck out of my life. 

Annalouiza (30:35.267)
Mm-hmm. Been there.

Sam Lee Zemke (30:37.258)
Everything. But as that passed and softened and that part of me died for the moment, I was able to go, oh, part of what I'm working on is how to be in service and have boundaries. 

Annalouiza (30:56.645)
Right. Right. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (31:02.67)
And I think that speaks to the resourcing question that like, like, it is really critical and it's part of the work that I've started doing externally too, more casually, you know, just with friends and I do have a natural sort of, like you were saying, like pastoral or minstrel care. My dad is a reverend in the Unity Church, you know, my mom's in the Sufi, it's in my blood. And I was raised around it.

Wakil David Matthews (31:26.35)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (31:28.465)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (31:32.62)
But being in service and showing up for people in whatever way I can, but encouraging every single person to really get intentional about the boundaries that we set. And that's part of the trickster archetype as well, is breaking down and setting up reforming, renegotiating where boundaries are. 
And so if the boundaries aren't working for you, if the container that you have created cannot contain what you're trying to do, if it's too big and it's not getting full enough, reform it and make it smaller or make it bigger or go ahead or ask for help.

Annalouiza (32:19.379)
Right. Or ask for help, right? Because, you know, as I'm listening to you, I, you know, I struggled with the same piece as like, you know, boundaries and people are like, you just don't have boundaries. Well, you know, part of it is like training, like, you know, you just get your formative years. You just you're supposed to be of service. But what I hear too from you and I want to bring this back to the death and dying component, you know…

Wakil David Matthews (32:30.212)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (32:45.326)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (32:49.373)
… we always talk about bearing witness to people's grief to bearing witness to the dying process that might be occurring, whether it be like dying to the person who, mean, dying to the essence of the person by removing their clothes from the closet or literally sitting with somebody who is emaciated and ready to go, you know, to the other side. But in moment to moment, again, we could be like, I'm so called to this. I'm ready to go. And then suddenly you get that feeling like, Oh God, I just really am. It's just too much. It's too heavy. 

Sam Lee Zemke (33:25.676)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (33:45.444)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (33:47.367)
You know, recognizing those very subtle moments and just being like, I am still here with you and I really would like to have somebody else join me or I'm still here with you and I hear you. Let's take a moment and like, let's regroup because I think that as pastoral care kind of folks, especially around death and dying, it is a slippery slope to like feel that nuance when it's a little too much for you. 

Sam Lee Zemke (33:52.983)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (34:00.258)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (34:01.378)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (34:17.544)
Right? Like I'm like, cause I know it's been, it doesn't happen a lot with like, I'm not going to say anything like that, but sometimes I need help. Sometimes I need a breath and people might be in front of you really needing a lot, a lot, a lot. And suddenly it's like, Whoa, it's a little much for me. So yes. So understanding that nuance of boundaries and it's okay because it's going to be okay. You know, you just have to recognize it.

Sam Lee Zemke (34:19.116)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so much of this stuff. I mean, we're stepping into a support role because these things are too big for one person. And that includes us too. It can be way, way too big for us. 

Annalouiza (34:31.249)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right, right. We forget that though.

Wakil David Matthews (34:32.61)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (34:47.318)
You know? like we've so much because we are so not, we're not enculturated to view each other as resource. To like there's this idea that we have to do it alone and that's the ideal that the goal is to be a totally self-contained being which yes but also we are interconnected and we are interdependent like maybe one of the only things that I would be comfortable pegging as human nature is that we are social and that we have gotten where we are together.

Annalouiza (34:48.157)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (34:57.206)
Mm, 

Annalouiza (35:14.547)
Right. Well, and Sam, the other part of that is we've been cultured to think that once you study or certify or get ordained or whatever, right, that is the only thing that you can do and nobody else can do it. Like, right? Like, like I can, I can hold space. I can hold sacred space. I could death midwife you. could spiritual direct you, but so can you and you.

Sam Lee Zemke (35:26.734)
Mmm.

Wakil David Matthews (35:34.808)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (35:40.151)
And you like, join me. Let me just like tell you what we're going to be doing. And just like to like it's almost like this, like, you know, two cells, we become one. And now we're like really supporting that other person who was before us. Right. But we wait. But people always like, I can't do that. I'm not trained. I mean, there's there's truth to that, too. But if we're going to live as an interconnected organism, helping each other in these moments, then like inviting others who don't have that signifier, it still means that they could be there to support, right? Like you don't have to say, well, I can't do that because I, you know, I'm not ordained. And I'm like, yes, you can come, come hold my hand. It's okay.

Sam Lee Zemke (36:11.308)
Right. Right.

Wakil David Matthews (36:17.546)
Ha ha.
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (36:20.77)
Right, right. I was editing an episode yesterday with the grief book, little book libraries. And she was talking about the lady in her church who just shows up to people's doors when they're grieving and does their laundry. 

Annalouiza (36:42.343)
Yes, yes!

Wakil David Matthews (36:43.022)
Yeah. Right, exactly. Yeah.

Annalouiza (36:46.671)
Yeah, we could all show up.

Sam Lee Zemke (36:47.808)
Like that's the kind of stuff that it takes. That's what it takes. We can all show up and we all have unique gifts to show up with. And like we were talking, you know, go, go to your community, meet your neighbors. What do your neighbors need? That was another one of the most amazing things I learned in my time with my uncle is he'd been in his house for 30 years and knew his neighbors. And, know, one day the neighbor needed a stump burned out from their yard. 

Wakil David Matthews (36:50.914)
Yeah, yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (36:59.332)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (37:11.155)
I love it.

Sam Lee Zemke (37:17.454)
And so we spent the day sitting in their yard, watching a fire. And we could get down all the roads of like the roadblocks with that where, you know, housing insecurity and things like that interrupt our ability to build lasting relationships. Because if you don't know that, you know, that you're going to live in the same place next year, what's the point in meeting your neighbors? 

Wakil David Matthews (37:39.042)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's an essence of or an aspect of trust and faith there too, to have the faith to other people that everybody around you is capable in one way or another of being support for you and opening up to that or being willing to open to that.

Sam Lee Zemke (37:46.434)
Mm-hmm.

Annalouiza (37:54.769)
Yes. Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (38:06.332)
And get kind of give in to that or let go to that reality. Well, this is so fun. We're having a great time.

Anyway, I think one of things we always like to ask, I think is important to kind of understand too, is what kind of challenges are, both things like what kind of challenges you face and then how you support yourself, how you care for yourself. So those are always good questions to get to. And I don't want to interrupt the flow either. This has been an amazing, this is an amazing conversation. So, but those are things we could talk about.

Annalouiza (38:56.031)
It is amazing. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (38:57.91)
Yeah. Containers, right? We are in a container in this episode. And so the questions help create that container because we could just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. 

Wakil David Matthews (39:11.076)
Which is all fine too.

Sam Lee Zemke (39:19.412)
Which is great too. It's lovely. It's a different kind of container. So the question is, what are the challenges I face? And how do I sort of support myself? That is such a good question right now because I'm asking myself those questions every day. And there are a lot of challenges. A lot of it, think, for me is getting out of my own way. I grew up coping by becoming small to be safe. so embracing my gifts and acknowledging them and allowing them to be seen and showing up in the fullness can sometimes be a challenge. And there are a lot of inner voices that fight that. 

And then on a material level the... how do I say this?

Well, my mom often says that I'm made for the next world, not for this one, as a liminal trickstery person. 

Annalouiza (40:49.479)
Ha ha ha.

Wakil David Matthews (40:53.142)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (41:14.22)
And so things like, and you've had this conversation with so many people on the show, money. Money is the bane of my existence. I've done a really good job and I am eminently lucky to have been able to find a way to walk in the world interacting with that minimally. My primary currency is relationship and service and connection. so that works great a lot of the time. And then sometimes the the reality of the economic world that we live in, especially right now, 

Annalouiza (41:48.083)
Yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (42:06.402)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (42:13.582)
… hits like a train. And the narrative, the cultural narrative that we live under, that money is how we do life, can get really, really overwhelming. I've gotten a lot of great feedback and encouragement to from you included, Wakil, to further develop these skills that I'm already practicing uncertified as a spiritual counselor and a pastoral to go, you know, I'm in the process of looking into going back to grad school for my masters in divinity and becoming ordained as a chaplain. And that's expensive. That's so expensive, especially to go to the really cool school down in San Francisco. 

Annalouiza (42:53.501)
Yeah, so expensive.

Wakil David Matthews (43:12.835)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (43:13.432)
Like, my gosh. my gosh. And so the work there is to figure out how to leverage my gifts as a community oriented person who has spent a lifetime building relationship and say like, hey community, is there room even now or especially now that you can come together and help me do this?

Wakil David Matthews (43:23.524)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (43:43.456)
Because the non-monetary benefit of more people who can tend to the souls of our communities, the better. And I think that's a maybe one of the things I would add to the totally non-exhaustive list that you read at the beginning, know, is soul tending. Soul tending is really the name of the game for me, you know, whether it's clearing out coats, whether it's where I live now, you know, there was an area under the barn that had just filled up with cardboard boxes. And so there was a path that was blocked. And so there was, it's feng shui, it's acupuncture, it's, you know, but on a land scale. 

Wakil David Matthews (43:49.218)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (44:13.336)
And so this building, had a blocked energy channel. And even just clearing enough that there's a small path to walk, cleared that channel and everything relaxed. Everything shifted and could flow better. We can do that. People, relationships, land, buildings, rooms, you know, because everything's alive and everything has a spirit back to that animacy, that animism, you know, like, you know.

Wakil David Matthews (44:21.602)
Wow. Wow.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (44:38.333)
Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (44:41.698)
Where do your shoes want to be in your house?

Wakil David Matthews (44:42.296)
Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, my feeling when I hear you talk about that is, yeah, that is the chaplaincy master's degree. It is very expensive and there's a level at which you don't need any of that. You're already doing this work. And like Annalouiza was saying earlier, we have this sense that we can't do it because we haven't got the certificates on the wall, right? 

Annalouiza (44:46.248)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (45:00.856)
Mm-mm.

Wakil David Matthews (45:14.4)
But on the other hand, Annalouiza and I are both the kind of people who have always done this work. I think at some point we went back, we went to this process of school because we thought maybe that, I don't know why we thought, what we thought that was going to do. But one thing it, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (45:26.382)
legitimacy or something, right?

Annalouiza (45:30.151)
Yeah, well, you know, I actually the reason I went was because I wanted to learn the protocols, right? And I remember even my ex-husband was like, you've been doing this forever. I'm not sure why you're going back to school. And I was like, I was like, wow. But I have to say, I think that there is a place for people to not have to go back and do the, you know, the whole it's a capitalist grind at the end of the day to do this. 

Sam Lee Zemke (45:36.408)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (45:53.122)
Yes, yes.

Annalouiza (46:00.003)
And what we're choosing to study is not going to be financially like abundant for us. It is, it is, it is, it is a thing of love for us. Right. But that said, I mean, and I know that Sam, you have, walk in community with, with elders, you walk with Wakil like, I think there is a place for training in a very like subtle and intimate way with somebody who is on the path and, being, and being, you know, open to being checked, like, you know, think about this. You know, being with a spiritual director, I think there's so many ways to do this without having to become so financially strangled is what happens. Like it was really hard. I, I, yeah, I, I, yes, it still is.

Wakil David Matthews (46:40.164)
Still is right. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Annalouiza went through all that and she's not getting rich from, you know, this is not happening, you know. And that's true for many people. I don't know, actually, most of the people from our cohort that I've talked to are not, you know, the only reason that I'm not getting any, you know, financial reward from it either, really, I mean, seriously, you know, so but I but I have this… 

Sam Lee Zemke (46:48.716)
Right, yeah.

Annalouiza (47:05.713)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (47:08.782)
But I agree, you know, what did help me was the sense of really connecting and learning more about processing and protocol. And mostly, really, I'll say mostly the thing that I got most out of that was the ongoing connection to my cohort. 

Sam Lee Zemke (47:15.436)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Annalouiza (47:24.359)
Community.

Wakil David Matthews (47:26.099)
Yeah, to the community. And that's probably the most important thing I got out of it, much more than how to do it.

Sam Lee Zemke (47:30.974)
interesting, interesting.

Annalouiza (47:31.875)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't know. We could talk, Sam. I do want to encourage. mean, spirit is spirit. And spirit calls every single human to connect, right? 

Sam Lee Zemke (47:37.708)
Sure.

Wakil David Matthews (47:46.564)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (47:46.764)
Right, right.

Annalouiza (47:51.763)
And it's capitalism that tells us to well, before even capitalism, was like trying to keep others in service to you, the patriarchy or whatever. I have the information. You're not privy to it. And so I if we're going to stop being hierarchical in our belief system, then let's share the wealth of knowledge. 

Sam Lee Zemke (47:57.102)
Right?
Mmm.

Wakil David Matthews (48:12.067)
Yes.

Sam Lee Zemke (48:12.227)
Right.

Annalouiza (48:19.955)
Let's also have the humility to say to hear when somebody's like think about what you're doing. This might be a little like, you know, could endanger both your spirit and that other person's spirit. And, you know, sometimes people like flare up and be like, well, I know what I'm doing. Like I don't understand, but you know, it's about like not creating more trauma to our spirits. At the end of the day, that's, that's where I stand. Like I'm going to take care of myself and I need you to be safe too. So Sam, join the pastoral group. Here you are, I invite you in. You've been doing it.

Wakil David Matthews (48:18.463)
You're in it. Yeah, you're in it. Yeah

Sam Lee Zemke (48:42.958)
Yeah, yeah, well I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. That keeps that it's so funny that keeps happening. When when I was initiated into the Sufi Ruhaniat, my Initiator who is a very non-hierarchical self-described like anarchist old-school like theoretical political cogent theory anarchist. He was like, I'm not going to give you a name. I'm not going to do that. And, and that was an interesting walk because the name gives a certain level of legitimacy within the community hierarchy. And so I walked in the community without a name, which is a really interesting liminal place to be. 

Wakil David Matthews (49:29.838)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (49:41.452)
But there was the not necessarily causal difficulty of breaking boundaries in a way that like ejected me from the community for a little while because I pushed on some buttons that were really tender. 

Wakil David Matthews (50:00.1)
Yes, yes.

Sam Lee Zemke (50:07.566)
And that's another story, maybe another conversation around the learning process of how to navigate boundaries, liminal spaces, and transformation in a way that doesn't burn everything down around you. 

Annalouiza (50:14.547)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wakil David Matthews (50:14.852)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (50:37.582)
Which is a big, big practice because I have a lot of that fire when I see things that aren't working and the justice part, if I see injustice or unfairness, I'm like, nope, that's not a good container. Let's break it and make a new one. 

Wakil David Matthews (50:58.884)
Love that.

Annalouiza (51:03.099)
Ruh Roh…

Wakil David Matthews (51:07.726)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Sam Lee Zemke (51:08.782)
But, to do that more gently and kindly. Anyway, over the years, the name came on its own. And just this last year, I got to visit with that teacher, with that initiator, friend on the path. And I was finally at a place where I was like, hey, I've been sitting with this, this came on its own. And he was like, yeah, that's how it should be. Yep, that's your name, you're in it. And I was like, oh, great, okay. So this feels similar of like, yeah, you're already here, you know. 

Wakil David Matthews (51:18.776)
Yes.

Annalouiza (51:23.335)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sam Lee Zemke (51:38.382)
I think the piece with schooling, right, is that it's just a different avenue. The path is the path, the stream is the stream, and our gifts are our gifts. And it's the different ways that we develop them and different containers of learning, of development, fit us differently and form us differently. And I think that's part of the maybe the appeal of school is it there are skills that I would love to learn that I think would really thrive and develop in that setting. But that could also thrive and develop in a mentorship setting, you know, it's it's

Wakil David Matthews (51:53.486)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (51:53.555)
Right. And I'm, I'm going to just also point out that, and this is, want to also encapsulate this in the, you know, death doula, death midwifery, you know, home funeral kind of placement, because I think right now everything is getting out there. Like take the doula death doula, you know, certification, 400 hours, $5,000. And you can go out and change a shingle. And, you know.

Sam Lee Zemke (52:13.742)
Right

Annalouiza (52:20.581)
And so, I honor that many people have established these learning places for people who really need that kind of pedagogy. Okay. It's, it's, and it is important. Not everybody is the same kind of learner. I was just talking to a friend of mine who spends time with this group of people and they all are working on counseling skills in situ as a community. And so they go together to learn how to be a counselor in this cohort on their own. 

Sam Lee Zemke (52:54.894)
Amazing. Amazing.

Annalouiza (53:12.241)
You know, like they're not they're not taking classes. I think I don't even think I don't remember them if there's any kind of hard currency that is exchanged, but they meet like once a month. It's a three hour and sit down. There's always like somebody who leads who's trying to help the learning. And I thought about that. I recognize that as a really community oriented, supportive learning space. Right. 

Wakil David Matthews (53:23.694)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (53:36.377)
And now we're taking it away from like, you know, I have to work and get a loan and try to make it and, you know, do the books, whatever. This was I was like, this is how death probably is death midwifery would work really well with us. Like herbalism, like I studied herbalism, right? Like I would love to just like share. I want to share my knowledge. So I invite you and any listener who are curious about this work and believe that they have like something calling to them. You know, I encourage you to go and look for different, you know, pathways to to seeing this. 
Sam Lee Zemke (53:40.834)
Yeah, right.

Wakil David Matthews (54:03.321)
Yeah, yeah.

Annalouiza (54:05.487)
Because it's not just about paying for the thing, you know?

Wakil David Matthews (54:07.928)
Yeah, yeah. It's a gift. That sounds like the idea of gift economy, you know, that we can share in community. We can get together. We can share what we know and help each other learn more and be more present for what's needed right now. I love that. That's beautiful. We should create one of those.

Sam Lee Zemke (54:18.478)
Right, exactly.

Annalouiza (54:20.967)
Yep. Uh-huh. We should. Like, yeah. Like, we... I know people who have talked about this with me, so it's already back there somewhere simmering.

Sam Lee Zemke (54:23.83)
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And then how, and then in, in that and, building that… 

Wakil David Matthews (54:32.598)
Yeah, yeah, okay, it's up there.

Sam Lee Zemke (55:01.454)
… my gosh, we're talking like so in my, in another one of my, in another one of my passion and another one of my like passion places is how do we build the next world inside the shell, the dying shell of this one, because the systems that we've been living under are dying. We are watching it in real time around us and 

Annalouiza (55:02.003)
Well, I hope so.

Wakil David Matthews (55:06.188)
Ha ha ha.

Annalouiza (55:06.791)
Deathbed wave, death.

Sam Lee Zemke (55:22.822) 
God I hope so. I mean it's becoming something right right it's becoming something else whether it's uh whether it serves humanity better or not is up to all of us. But, as we build this new self inside, right, the molting crab, the molting exoskeleton, becoming the next butterfly, whatever that metaphor is, how do we build into those systems that everybody gets food on the table and still has a roof over their head and has childcare? How do we do those things when those have become so tied with the monetary system and are used to keep us locked into that? 

Annalouiza (55:53.201)
Yeah.

Annalouiza (55:58.611)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (56:03.106)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Annalouiza (56:03.41)
Right.

Sam Lee Zemke (56:09.216)
How do we give of ourselves in a way that all of our basic needs are met, and we actually build and grow stability and security together.

Annalouiza (56:16.273)
Right. All right. Well, I'm going to rock your world one last time here. But I was just listening to a podcast yesterday. And it is about this researcher who studied some moths or butterflies. I can't remember. But her studies showed that after five weeks of being in the chrysalis, they emerged and could still remember the experiences from before, which has blown so many of the scientific world away, right?

Sam Lee Zemke (56:44.586)
Talk about cellular memory because the other part of that is that in the chrysalis, at least for butterflies, they completely dissolve. They are nothing but like a pocket of goo for a while. But that, that decentralized... Right. Amazing.

Annalouiza (56:57.967)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the fact that they remember. Yeah. So going back to what you said about creating while we're still in our own chrysalis as a humanity, right? It's our dream time. We have to remember those dreams…

Wakil David Matthews (57:01.677)
Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah, I love it.

Sam Lee Zemke (57:16.29)
Hmm.

Annalouiza (57:22.981)
… of when we had that actually happening to us, when we could feed our families, when we could have community, when the touch of each other was so readily available, where we weren't feeling like there was scarcity, right? And so as we begin to emerge, I hope that all of us can remember those poignant moments of humanity and bring it into our next creation.

Sam Lee Zemke (57:32.067)
Right.

Wakil David Matthews (57:41.956)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's reminding me of two books that we did. One book that we did in our Sufi book club for a while was one that really, I think, rocked our world then. It was called Hospicing Modernity. 

Sam Lee Zemke (57:59.822)
Mmm.

Annalouiza (58:08.775)
Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (58:11.064)
It was an amazing kind of like just what you're talking about. is where the culture that we live in is unsustainable and is collapsing around us. So how do we hospice that into something that's a different kind of way. And then Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks a lot to this gift economy and what we could create by remembering the Indigenous way of caring for each other and for being in community. So I think we're all talking about that same kind of hope and prayer and work to get to that point. 

Annalouiza (58:15.847)
Yep. Yep.

Sam Lee Zemke (58:35.01)
To bring it back to what I was... The symbolic death. And we've just been talking about, know, hospicing modernity and things like that. And the returning and remembering those indigenous life ways, those land-based, community-based, integrated life ways is one of the other streams of my work. And I can plug, I did a podcast about it for a little while, I five episodes two years ago. 

Wakil David Matthews (59:29.188)
Great. We'll put it in the podcast notes.

Sam Lee Zemke (59:40.098)
And put it in the notes, I did it, that in the indigenous revival, especially European, which is where I focus, you know I grew up very close to indigenous American cultures and people and community. And through my life, like the question of how do you listen and learn from that without appropriating…

Wakil David Matthews (01:00:09.518)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:00:10.39)
And with acknowledging that we as Euro-descendant people also have that in our lineages. 

Wakil David Matthews (01:00:21.86)
Yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:00:27.052)
It's further back and there's been like not in an oppression Olympics way, a much larger, a longer legacy of intentional destruction of those life ways. The colonial and evangelical processes started in Europe to subjugate the indigenous cultures there. 

Wakil David Matthews (01:00:41.433)
Yes.

Annalouiza (01:00:54.845)
Yep.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:01:03.216)
And those, the fragments we have of those containers are much more sparse. And we can get into, I mean, this happens in any indigenous culture rocked, cracked, shattered by the colonial modernity project, capitalist project, whatever you want to call it.

And because we've all been shaped by that force, those containers don't exist anymore in the same way, and they can't contain the world. And so we can take the shards of that pot that we can find and incorporate them into the new container we make for the world going forward.

And so rather than playing purity games about what is authentically Norse this, what is like authentically blah, blah, blah. Like we can try to understand them on an authentic level, but we can't recreate that because it doesn't exist anymore. The world of the world.

Annalouiza (01:02:23.289)
No, but we're quilting. We're taking the little pieces of all these and quilting.

Wakil David Matthews (01:02:23.81)
Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:02:26.518)
We're quilting. Yes, quilting. I love that metaphor. To create a blanket, to create the next one and as many of those pieces as we can incorporate and remember and reclaim and build together, the better. I think the more resilient that container is going to be.

Wakil David Matthews (01:02:47.256)
Yes, yes, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the organization. Yeah, maybe so. The organization that the author of the modern hospice in modernity created is called Decolonializing the Future. So I'll send you some links to that. 

Anyway, we should try to finish this up. Is there anything that we haven't gotten into that we should? There's a lot. I guess just really quickly, do you have any fear of death and anything else that you wish we'd have talked about?

Sam Lee Zemke (01:05:47.52)
Oh, fears of death. Not really. Death is just another step in the journey. It's just another threshold that we cross. I'm curious to see what's on the other side, whether it's me or not, know, whether I'm a coherent me there or not.

Wakil David Matthews (01:06:05.506)
Right, yeah.

Annalouiza (01:06:05.811)
Totally.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:06:17.41)
There's a lot of stuff to be afraid of, and I certainly have a fair amount of that. But I fear that we won't get our stuff together to show up for each other way more than death. 

Wakil David Matthews (01:06:38.308)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:06:52.574)
I guess maybe that's a fear of death is a fear of mass death, a fear of like, you know, as who was it that said was it Gabor Mate or someone said, you know, I'm less concerned with. It was something about, you know, I mourn for all of the Einsteins that have died due to negligence or war or genocide, you know, those sorts of things. And so not on a personal level, but on a global, that one. 

Wakil David Matthews (01:07:18.839)
Yeah, I love that idea of, go ahead. Yeah. I love that idea of, know, will we remember or will we, will we know, will we remember the caterpillar basically? If we go back to that earlier thing, or, not. 

Sam Lee Zemke (01:07:46.786)
Right? Will we remember in time? Will we remember in time?

Annalouiza (01:07:47.111)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Wakil David Matthews (01:08:05.252)
Yeah. And will we communicate, will we still have communications going on? Like we had no one, you just edited that one. I think that the one person who was talking about communicating beyond, beyond the veil. Well, wonderful. should finish up. And Sam, you're going to have a really big job on this one. And luckily, you get to edit yourself. So it's your own fault. Right? 

Annalouiza (01:08:15.015)
Yes. Dude, sound bites.

Wakil David Matthews (01:09:31.46)
So do you want to read the poem or do want one of us do or both of us do? OK.

Sam Lee Zemke (01:10:46.786)
So this is Die Before You Die, by our beloved friend Rumi.

O Generous Ones,
Die before you die, 
even as I have died before death
and brought this reminder from Beyond.

Become the resurrection of the spirit
so you may experience the resurrection.

This becoming is necessary
for seeing and knowing
the real nature of anything.

Until you become it,
you will not know it completely,
whether it be light or darkness.

If you become Reason,
you will know Reason perfectly

If you become Love,
you will know Love's flaming wick.

~ Rumi
Mathnawi VI: 754-758
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Daylight"
Threshold Books, 1994